Petits Choux-Choux

I don't think I'm excessively obsessed with either the notion of aging (except insofar as it inevitably leads to death, about which I'm less than thrilled) nor with the fact that no, I will never again look good in a bikini, and although much of my free time is given over to the creation of self-adornment (I bead jewellery FOR ME and I knit garments FOR ME), I don't actually spend more than a couple of minutes while brushing my teeth in the morning, agonizing over what I will wear that day. In general I prefer my clothes and jewellery to be clean and to match, more or less, and to be flattering rather than the converse, but other than "I'm in the mood for a dress", or "I'm going to the ballet", it doesn't matter too much.

I'm at the age where the phrase "mutton dressed up as lamb" has the potential to be somewhat relevant, which is to say that I'm old enough to know better, but young enough not to want to. This means that age-wise I'm in the ballpark of Desperate Housewives (I think), which in Hollywood means smokin', but in the real world means that cute boys will never fall hopelessly in love with me as I walk by. (It tickles me to think it might have happened in the past though).

Still, even though I'm not about to swap out my current wardrobe for elastic-waist stretch pants, twinsets, sensible shoes and just-so strings of pearls (although I do have a few fine strings; I'm weak for pearls), I do sometimes wonder whether my clothes are age-appropriate.

Take camisoles.

I take a half-hour walk every day at lunchtime, and given that we're currently experiencing summer in all its, um, heat, and that I'm not a big fan of the farmers' tan or variants thereof, I wear a camisole when I walk at lunchtime to minimize the tan lines, (such as they are; my skin tone is not given over to remarkable tans. When I was a teenager and spent every waking moment worshipping the sun, I'd end the summer ever so slightly golden to everyone else's deep olive). 

Here's the thing.

I'm lucky in that gravity doesn't have a whole lot to work with (clearly the Implants, All Implants, All The Time crew would dispute my choice of the word "lucky", but then, they're hardly doctoral students of vocabulary, so I don't spare them more than the passing thought), so the fact that the camisoles have what is strangely called a "shelf bra" isn't as insignificant as it might be were I blessed with a whole lot more redundancy in the chest department, but still, I am not, as I mentioned, quite as young (and therefore perky) as I once was, and I'm not altogether sure that I should be inflicting myself in a camisole on an unsuspecting public, even one with a shelf bra, which does, if you have not yet inferred this, virtually nothing in the Support Department.

Today though, I felt rather better about the whole thing, or at least about my participation in the exercise as I passed by someone who was not only wearing a camisole much like mine, but also floral short-shorts and high heels. Oh yes, she had about twenty-five years on me and I could tell that she was DEFINITELY too old to be wearing a camisole, even one with a shelf bra.

Of course that still doesn't help with the immediate question of whether I'm too old now, though I do know that twenty-five years from now I will be.